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Users of Microsoft's Bing search engine are more susceptible to receiving malware-infected results than those who use competing platforms such as Google, analysts have found. German antivirus firm AV-Test analyzed roughly 11 million searches conducted through Bing and found that 1,285 of them returned potentially malicious results, compared with just 272 malware-infected websites delivered by Google.

The fourth quarter saw the average rate of malware-infected Windows computers increase to about 17 out of every 1,000, triple the number of infections identified in the previous quarter, Microsoft's Security Intelligence report says. "The report continues to reinforce that it's critical to deploy advanced tools at the endpoint that can detect anomalies, such as malware that evades signature-based tools like antivirus," said Jonathan Thompson, CEO of Rook Consulting.

The Google Play store contained almost four times as many malware-infected applications in 2013 as it did in 2011, according to RiskIQ, an online security services outfit, which says about 42,000 apps contained spyware and data-stealing Trojan programs. The malware could provide third parties with access to phone conversations, e-mail and contact lists or even take over control of the devices, RiskIQ says.

Isolating and repairing a malware-infected computer system is just one step in a process that hopefully ends with identifying the source of the attack, but experts say getting to the culprit is more complicated than simply following a trail of breadcrumbs. According to a new report from FireEye, while many attacks are accompanied by regional signatures that point to a particular country or organization, strategic attribution involves considering a variety of factors, including the possibility of being intentionally misled.

PandaLabs estimates that nearly one-third of all computers in the U.S. are infected with some type of malware. The computer-security firm identifies South Korea as the country with the highest level of malware-infected PCs, at about 57%, and Switzerland as having the lowest level, at 18.4%.